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Jerksblog!

Date-Based Archive While Supplies Last...

I better get my internet fix quick, as I'm getting a new computer here at work at about 2pm.

I won't be able to answer any more email after that until about 6pm - if that - as I don't know how much I'll actually be home after work.

Not only am I getting a new computer, but the entire company is upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP, and from Word 6 to Word 2000, all in one wrenching transition that is sure make things explode internally. That's what I meant by "Infopocalyse" ... something everyone failed to comment on in my last post.

Posted by erin at 11:55 AM | Comments (7)

Date-Based Archive Four Horseman of the Infopocalypse

The company I work for has the largest database of insurance information in the entire world. The company also keeps an enormous number of forms and documents in the dark heart of its databanks. Working here has taught me a word I wish I had never heard:

Metadata

Metadata is data about data. Most of my job is dealing with metadata and not actual data. This drives me to madness.

I learned a great word from Snow Crash, an otherwise dull book. That word describes the inner-working of my company:

Infopocalypse.

The way my company works is so complicated that it's hard to "see the forest for the trees." Although some people understand the overall functioning of the company, no one person can keep track of all the small details at one time. Communication breaks down, data is lost, and the whole office seems like an Infopocalypse at times.

I have identified the Four Horseman of the Infopocalypse:

1. Tyranny - Tyrants of information hold under lock, key, and password, data important to those who may need it. A high level of security does not equal a high level of knowledgeability.

2. Corruption - As data is transferred across mediums and platforms and versions, it becomes corrupt. Information is lost forever, beginning at the very beginning as scribes reek havoc with numbers. The earliest printers using presses corrupted information forever - we are no better as we adopt things for the internet.

3. Glossolalia - Languages change and divide over time. Terminology changes. It does not take a dialect to divide understanding, it only takes a little jargon for confusion to reign over all.

4. Chaos - The last and worse of all the horseman, chaos results in a permanent loss and scattering of information. Without a stable infrastructure, everything falls apart.

Posted by erin at 04:53 PM | Comments (16)

Date-Based Archive Hi Dad!

I told my dad about this blog. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be a mistake. He’s always bugging me for updates, and I update this blog way more often then I email him.

I seriously doubt he'll be able to master adding comments, and he'll probably lose the URL after a couple of days. He definately won't figure out the whole "Click to read more" thing.

Posted by erin at 07:25 PM | Comments (8)

Date-Based Archive The Ubercon Report: Part Three: Games Played, Overall Convention

I’ve been really lagging in finishing up my report of Ubercon, despite work being totally dead lately.

Games Played

While at Ubercon I played several games besides Cthulhu that I had never played before. Some of the games were out of print, or the editions I played were out of print. It was really neat to be playing a game in a conference room and have someone walk by and say “Wow! Is that Game X?! I haven’t played that in years! I love that game!” I can’t say why I got such a kick out of that – it must be me sinking further into geekdom.

Click below for more:

Awful Green Things From Outer Space - In the Steve Jackson Games room we played Awful Green Things From Outer Space, which is out of print. It’s a two player game. The board is a map of a spaceship and one player plays the crew while the other player plays the awful green aliens that are trying to take over the ship. Aliens and crew members have movement allowances and hit points, and 6-sided die are used to determine outcomes. Effects of the available weapons on the aliens are determined at random by drawing cards. J---n played the aliens and N. played the humans (well, not humans so much as other aliens) while M---n and I looked on and gave input. The aliens won. It was an OK game, but only for two people – not four.

Illuminati - Illuminati is an awesome game involving non-collectable cards and conspiracy networks. Each player works to control a conspiracy-based organization like “The Bermuda Triangle” or “The Network.” Each large conspiracy group builds an empire using smaller conspiracy groups, like the Moonies, Punks, the IRS, Hackers, etc. Money is collected on each turn. Players can then use that money to effect the outcome of bids for control of cards. There are two ways to win – either control a set number of cards (usually 12), or complete your group’s individual objective. Illuminati is awesome because cheating is allowed! The only rule about cheating is that if someone catches you at it and calls you on it, you have to undo your cheat. We played the first game of Illuminati in a tournament-setting and I won! I have a gift certificate for the Complete Strap in the mail.

Chez Geek - Chez Geek is played with a deck of colorful, humorous (non-collectable) cards. Each player plays a roommate in a geeky house. Your objective is to collect enough “Slack Points” to win. Some of the jokes on the cards were pretty good, and the art was funny enough. I’m not sure how the makers of the game would define the word “geek,” as I found much of the game to be an accurate reflection of post-college life, non-specific to geekdom.

Overall Convention

Overall, the convention was much more fun than I had anticipated. The hotel, despite it’s difficult location, was very nice and looked like a castle on the outside. I liked the food at the pub and restaurant inside the hotel, even if it was hideously over-priced. The only other options for food were the surprisingly-not-horrible sandwich vending machines.

N. and I went swimming in the hotel. [One of these days, I’m going to have to get a new swimsuit. I’ve had my current suit since 1993. It still magically fits, and only some of the stitching is coming loose – not bad for a decade! ] Anyway, N. insisted that swimming at the convention would be “awesome” but it was not. The pool was filled with little kids who were clearly not there for the convention, and the hot tub was filled with old people, also not there for the convention. N. had assumed that interesting and large geeky conventioneers would fill the hot tub and tell stories of geekdom. This was disappointingly not the case.

Overall attendance at the convention was very low. That was fine by me, since it meant everything was pretty casual, and there was lots of room for pick-up games. I kind of felt bad for the organizers, though – the scheduling was ridiculously well-organized, and the organizers seemed very experienced with organizing conventions. Why was attendance so low?

For one thing, this was the first-ever Ubercon, and it was over a holiday weekend. Maybe some geeks already had plans. Maybe the convention wasn’t well-advertised. Maybe the total lack of mass transit directions on the Ubercon web page led to a lack of draw from the New York Metro area.

Whatever the problem, I hope that they decide to throw another Ubercon, and that it is a success!

Posted by erin at 07:23 PM | Comments (4)

Date-Based Archive The Latest From Dave

I think it's some kind of Spiderman parody. He called it Spiderwolf.

Posted by erin at 01:07 AM | Comments (5)

Date-Based Archive Refinery Fire on Staten Island

Posted by erin at 01:24 PM | Comments (1)

Date-Based Archive The Ubercon Report: Part Two: Call of Cthulhu - It's like Anti-D&D

During Ubercon I played not one, but two games of Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is kind of like Deadlands, except that it takes place in reality (not the steam-punk universe) and you just can't win.

Call of Cthulhu is a game of frustration - and in this key way it differs wildly from Dungeons and Dragons. In D&D, you are given (or find, or it is fairly easy to obtain) armor and weapons. You fight monsters. You gain experience points. In Call of Cthulhu you are very rarely given weapons or armor, you hardly ever find a monster - and if you do you can't (or shouldn't) fight it. Should your character go on to fight in another game, you will lose sanity points for your experience.

Click below for more:

An example of the frustration of Cthulhu:

Keeper: You see a very strange, hoof-like footprint in the mud.
Me: I have a Natural History stat - I'll roll that - I made it! Do I recognize the footprint?
Keeper: It looks like nothing you've ever seen before.

The Player is thwarted at every turn in Cthulhu - should one be unlucky enough to actually see a monster, one must roll one's sanity. If you lose that roll, you'll be lucky to be able to fight anything - at least for a few hours. If you get hurt there are no clerics, but there is some basic first aid. In the off-chance your character knows any magic, you spend sanity points to cast your spells.

There is very little dice-rolling in Cthulhu, and the games are light on combat. In each game I saw, the "Keeper" (DM) only cracked the source book once, and none of the players seemed to have or need a Player's handbook. There simply was no opportunity to bicker over the rules.

I really liked the game for three reasons:

1. It appealed to my self-destructiveness.
2. There were very few rules and modifiers to worry about.
3. The stories were very good and reminded me of episodes of Doctor Who.

Those of you who've gamed with me will notice that I tend to play self-destructive characters, like my four-armed drug-addicted J-pop star in our Cyberpunk game. I guess I'm just nuts - in my fantasy life I destroy myself instead of wielding big guns and destroying other people. I'm not sure why.

In a typical episode of Doctor Who the Doctor lands on a planet where something weird (and evil) is going on. He always gets mixed up in whatever sort of trouble it is, and through his superior intellect and good nature he usually manages to solve everything and help out whoever is in trouble (often without using weapons). The natives of the planet, in any given episode, are typically freaking out and can't handle whatever it is that's going on. Call of Cthulhu is like what the natives would do if the Doctor never showed up.

In the end there is no beating Cthulhu - even if you saw Cthulhu himself and you didn't go insane, and managed to fight and kill him (highly unlikely) - he'd just regenerate and come back later. Most of the game is dealing with Cthulhu cultists, or lesser evil creatures. In the two games I played nobody died or went permanantly insane, in fact, we achieved the objectives in both modules. However, we did not defeat any of Cthulhu's followers. After our games they were sure to spread across the earth...

Posted by erin at 05:00 PM | Comments (6)

Date-Based Archive No TV and No Beer Make Homer Something Something

This morning I had no internet connection at home. I'm guessing that's because all of the cables are on the roof, which is covered in two feet of snow. I hope I don't have to call the Roadrunner people, and that the connection will come back on automagically.

Meanwhile, here at the office, no one is here. Literally 5% of my company has bothered to show up. I'm taking off at noon, myself, having already intercepted a call from my absentee boss and a coworker.

Posted by erin at 12:04 PM | Comments (8)

Date-Based Archive The Ubercon Report: Part One: Getting There is Half the Fun

As many of you know, N and I went to Ubercon this weekend in Parsippany, New Jersey, which I think of as “Parsnippity, NJ.” Herein lies the account of our journey, in segments separated by topics. N and I traveled there with his roommate J~ and his other roommate, J~‘s girlfriend M~. Two members of NYU’s sci-fi club were also there, but they didn’t go with us, and we didn’t really hang out, we just said ‘hi’ a few times.

Ubercon left many driving directions on their website – but no mass transit directions. We called the hotel, which told us to take a bus from Penn Station. So on Saturday we set off, took the bus, and promptly got off and the correct stop 45 minutes later only to find ourselves standing in a median. The hotel was nowhere to be seen. So we called – and the hotel sent a shuttle. But there was a good 15 to 20 minutes while we stood in a median, and just outside a strip mall, wondering what was going on.

And we should have considered ourselves lucky, because leaving the Con was a million times worse!

Click below for more...

Due to the 2 feet of snow you may have noticed today, the busses stopped running, making our return tickets useless. There were no taxis or car services running either. So M~ put up signs around the con saying we’d give people money for a ride to the nearest train station.

Not long afterwards we found some scraggly young conventioneers from Boston who provided us with a driver. We paid him off, and some nice burly fellows in the parking lot helped push his car out of the snow bank/parking lot. Our driver was a funny guy, extremely positive and a skilled driver, considering the condition of the roads. He was heard to remark:

“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.”

When we finally got to the train station it was like a one-act play, or a disaster film. Some guy (40-ish, clearly from NJ) joined us who was obviously nuts – he’d just walked there from some number of miles away. Two idiotic women from Oklahoma arrived a little while later. They explained their woeful tale of flight cancellation at Laguardia, and then how they had – inexplicably – decided to go back to their original hotel in East Hanover, NJ to spend the night. They were having a really hard time getting back. There was also a level-headed local woman, and some guy waiting in his car.

After an hour of listening to the Oklahoma-southern-drawl, the train finally arrived. Then it took 2 hours to make a 45 minute journey – not back to Grand Central, but back to Hoboken, where we took the PATH to the subway and home again.

Meanwhile, I checked my voicemail. On Saturday, my roommate had locked herself out! All three people with spare keys were out of town all weekend, so she ended up changing the locks. Good thing she was home when I got there.

Posted by erin at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

Date-Based Archive In Your Neighborhood

My neighbor was totally having a fetish party tonight.

I was not invited.

Posted by erin at 02:35 AM | Comments (5)

Date-Based Archive Celebrities are watching you while you sleep in your underwear

I'm really tired today, and I'll tell you why.

Sure, I stayed up too late, as usual, but today is different because last night my roommate brought home a celebrity. We'll call him "Dave".

I didn't actually get to meet Dave, because I went to sleep around 1:30, and my roommate came home with him (both of them drunk, I'm sure) at around 3 or 4 in the morning. One major drawback to my apartment is that the bathroom is only accessible via my room, so it woke me up as my roommate and Dave made no less than 3 trips to the bathroom - made worse, perhaps, by the shoes and backpacks that litter the narrow path to the bathroom door.

Granted, my roommate usually comes home at 4am from her job, and quite often uses the bathroom at that hour. But usually she doesn't wake me up, because usually she hasn't brought home a celebrity.

I knew she had a date with Dave this evening. He gave her his phone number when he did a show at the comedy club attached to her strip club. He wrote on the napkin "Comedian - Bad Shirt" so she would remember who he was - which is ridiculous, because of course she knew who he was.

She had seen his show on Comedy Central, aptly titled "Insomniac." On Insomniac, Dave visits various U.S. cities to hang out at night - late at night - interviewing anyone who happens to be awake at crazy hours.

The irony is not lost on me that the host of Insomniac caused me to lose sleep. But the show is about people who can't sleep, not waking people up!

I laid awake in bed thinking, "Oh my god, Dave is in my living room, checking out the anime posters. I wonder if he even knows what anime is. I wonder if I left any underwear in the bathroom." I kind of wanted to meet him, but meeting a celebrity while in my pajamas, with my boyfriend in his boxer shorts did not seem like the best idea at the time.

Who knows? Maybe they'll keep going out.

Posted by erin at 09:51 AM | Comments (7)

Date-Based Archive Robotic Tapeworms Save the Future

In case you haven't watched the news, or picked up a newspaper, or had any contact with the media in any way in the last 3 to 5 years (possibly because of a jail sentence, bio-dome project, or hermittude) you might not know that Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Average weights are up, even in children (especially in children...) and the number-one killer of adults is heart disease, a known cause of which is obesity.

I predict that we will have to suffer this trend for a few more years, but only until such a time that nanotechnology takes off. At that point, the way I figure, robotic tapeworms will be able to keep us all thin and relatively healthy by processing excess calories that we consume before they get turned into fat. Unlike real tapeworms, which consume nutrients until you die (or it dies), robotic tapeworms could be programmed to only eat things like saturated fat and not things with actual nutritional value. These robotic parasites could then turn the fats and oils into something indigestible, something that would be naturally excreted by the body.

Think of how great it will be in the future when we have a cure for fatness! There will be more room on the subway! America's malls and amusement parks will cease to be hideous eyesores! Everyone's asses will fit nicely into coach seats on airplanes!

Best of all, we won't have to see any more stock footage of fat people on the evening news!

In the meantime I've lost 10 pounds on Weight Watchers.

Posted by erin at 01:08 PM | Comments (10)

Date-Based Archive Laws of Anime

http://www.bright.net/~nyla/animelaw.html

Posted by erin at 01:07 AM | Comments (1)

Date-Based Archive Classic TMOL

Gotta love the classics:

http://truemeaningoflife.com/oldwisdom.php?topid=15984&responses=1

http://truemeaningoflife.com/oldwisdom.php?topid=16107&responses=7

OOOoooh!! Late-breaking news!! I just got posted on TMOL:

http://truemeaningoflife.com/wisdom.php?topid=40955&responses=2

Posted by erin at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Date-Based Archive The Weather

Weather Pixie is cute, but kind of drives me nuts. There are too many weater pixies nowadays:

1.

2.
3.
4.
5.

A weather Geisha? A punk? A tiny girl? Is all this really necessary?

1-5, the weater in:

1. New York, NY
2. New York again, this time as told by Christina Ricci
3. Jackson, MI
4. Alaska
5. Sapporo, Japan

I assure you it is snowing much harder than that right now.

Posted by erin at 12:39 PM | Comments (4)

Date-Based Archive totally nuts

Please be patient, Erin's brain is experiencing technical difficulties.

It may be obvious, from recent post, that I have gone completely nuts lately. We're talking bonkers, insane, coo-coo, crazy. Stand by while Direct TV searches for satellite signal. If Windows stops working for more than 3 minutes, it may be necessary to restart your machine from the power switch. The number you have dialed is no longer in service, please make a note of it.

Click below for more:

I blame my job. I have been under a lot of stress at work lately, and in several well-documented cases I have proven that understanding how my company works is a direct cause of insanity in its employees. Unfortunately, cases of ex-employees who later regained sanity are not forthcoming.

This is nothing new - it was well established early on in my blog that surely my job would drive me insane. Later I started advocating hunter-gatherer societies as preferable to my current lifestyle. Kerry argued against this so relentlessly I began to have serious doubts as to my own sanity. But I take that with a grain of salt, as I know of Kerry's [interesting] mental health history.

My insanity is further heightened by the fact that I had promised several people (including important Hollywood types) that I would have a new draft of my script to them by January 1st. I thought, wrongly, that I would have all kinds of time over Christmas break to write. I was dead wrong.

In the past my Christmas breaks were long, tedious days of being snow-bound, shut-in, and sick. This Christmas was non-stop travelling and shopping, and required visits to relatives and friends on a daily basis. I finished nothing! I wrote nothing!

I figured I could throw something together in the first few weeks of January, but I was wrong! Things exploded at work! Too many exclamation points were used! Then I broke (my pirated copy of) Microsoft Word and lost my (borrowed) Final Draft CD. Fortunately Ryan, (because he's a super-hero,) helped me out with Word, and the Final Draft CD re-surfaced in N.'s room, right where I had left it. These things didn't prevent me from writing (in Simpletext) but they did prevent me from editing what I'd written for a good sold couple of weeks.

All this is further complicated by the part where I have to write a new screenplay this year to include in the Tisch log line book, the same place where I marketed the last one. The new screenplay has to be done by May, and judging from last year, coming up with a crappy rough draft by June isn't really the best plan.

Usually, when I feel stressed at work, I work on my screenplay. Working on my screenplay gives me the hope that some day, I will not be working my current job, that some day, I'll be doing something better for a living. It may seem like a long shot, but I have to believe that some day I'll have the career I want, and the best way to get there is by working on it right now.

So when I can't write... what's left? Madness.

Tonight I'll be working on the latest draft of my screenplay so I can send it to people before the end of the week.

Posted by erin at 04:58 PM | Comments (14)

Date-Based Archive I hate censorship!

I really hate censorship, and I never considered censoring people in the comments of my blog... until now. I've had to censor some of thecomicman's comments on this post. This is as per my regulations on the post "A Warning" where I say "that grace period is over."

Since I'm against most forms of censorship this really sucks for me, and it bothers me a lot to do it. But then again, I own erinfinnegan.com and I say what goes on it. I will not sit idly by while people call my boyfriend an asshole on my domain. I don't care if he is an asshole, or if you call him that on any other site, even a public one. You could buy Nisanassohole.com and put up big pictures of N, and that's fine, that's up to you.

I don't care if you're right - if he really is being an asshole, and you can say it my face (although you'd lose my friendship for doing so) - but sorry, not on my blog. It's not just because it's rude, and disrespectful, or I am keeping my site as a Ministry of Truth, rather, I'm censoring it because it hurts my feelings.

There are plenty of people you should feel free to call an asshole on my website (my dad, my brother, God, the president, Rick), but N. is simply not one of them. I think that's a reasonable request. I don't care if you deny the Holocaust, but the minute you hurt my feelings, I start deleting comments.

Posted by erin at 02:18 PM | Comments (19)

Date-Based Archive Steel Angels & Robot Maids

There is a new genre in anime, and that new genre is the steel angel/robot maid genre.

The genre is typified by this plotline: The military/government builds the perfect fighting machine, a robot/android girl with highly advanced weapons technology. She is capable of blowing up tanks and can leap buildings in a single bound. Her body takes the shape of a sexy high school-aged girl, usually between 14 and 17. Her costume? A ridiculous maid's outfit. Not quite as sexy as a French maid outfit, but fetishized nonetheless, complete with bows, ruffles, and an apron. Somehow the advanced-weapon-girl comes to live in the home of a young boy, sometimes of high school age, sometimes younger, and the boy falls in love with her as she protects him from large physical threats.

It is not quite shojou (girl's anime) and not quite hentai (perverted anime), but rather, somewhere in between. Like Octokitty, the Robot Maid genre makes use of non-pornographic yet highly fetishized gimmicks and costumes to make cartoons where no one has sex, yet sexuality is sublimated everywhere.

It seems to me that the genre must be much bigger than the three series I know of that fall into the category, but more examples are not forthcoming. The three series are:

1. Steel Angel Kurumi
2. Mahoromatic; Automated Maiden (The official home page is in Japanese, should anyone care to translate it for me...)
3. All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku (although she lacks the maid's outfit, and is part cat instead of part angel, I think this still counts.)

Posted by erin at 06:33 PM | Comments (7)

Date-Based Archive Work Sucks

Today I didn't even go to work. I was way too stressed out on Sunday night to sleep, and I would have been less than useful at work anyway. I wondered if maybe I wasn't having a nervious breakdown.

My job's current stress level should subside when certain life-saving code changes are migrated, but for now, it's giving me migraines. I had hoped to stay on until at least July, but now I'm seriously considering quitting, or at least very actively looking for a new job.

In honor of this, I have a new background on this blog.

The trouble with finding a new job is that it's got to have health insurance, and pay just as much, or nearly as much as my current job. I couldn't pay rent and eat if I earned less than $17 an hour. The kind of jobs I'm actually qualified to do pay way less than that.

Posted by erin at 05:54 PM | Comments (3)

Date-Based Archive No, seriously

Dave's comics make no sense. Seriously.

Posted by erin at 05:35 PM | Comments (4)

Date-Based Archive drunken

I'm really drunk right now. Frankly, I blame N. My weight watchers points for the day are totally blown away, since tequilla is like, 2 pts per shot. I had 10 points left for the day, but those are TOTALLY gone by now.

Look how lame my upper-case use of word TOTALLY was just now. THat's how drunk I am. Seriously.

I just met the Penny Arcade webmaster. She is really cool.

N is losing badly at DDR at the moment.

Posted by erin at 12:43 AM | Comments (32)